“This is no longer the city I once knew”.

Evictions, the
urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi

GAUTAM BHAN
ABSTRACT Millennial Delhi is changing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were
demolished in Delhi under “slum clearance” schemes. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, however, at
least 45,000 homes were demolished, and since the beginning of 2007, eviction notices have been
served on at least three other large settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted
in this latter time period have received any alternative resettlement sites. These evictions
represent a shift not just in degree but also in kind. They were not ordered by the city’s planning
agency, its municipal bodies or by the city government. Instead, each was the result of a judicial
ruling. What has this emergence of the judiciary into urban planning and government meant for
the urban poor? This paper analyzes the dictums of verdicts on evictions in the Delhi High Court
and the Supreme Court of India from 1985 to 2006. Using these judgments, it explores the
“misrecognition” of the poor that became dramatically apparent in the early 1990s and that
underlies and justifies evictions. This shift is then located in the larger political, economic and
aesthetic transformations that are re-configuring the politics of public interest in Indian cities.
KEYWORDS evictions / Delhi / India / judiciary / public interest / slums / urban poverty

I. INTRODUCTION

Scrap dealer Ashok says this is business as usual for politicians before elections: “Wait and watch, I
will vote here again in the next general elections, five years later.” (Frontline Magazine, 12-01-04)

Ashok was wrong. In January 2003, the Ministry of Tourism of the government of India announced
its plan to redevelop a 100-acre strip of publicly owned land on the banks of the Yamuna River into
a riverside promenade meant to be a major new tourist attraction. At the time, the riverbank was
home to a string of settlements (colloquially and collectively called Pushta) that housed around
35,000 families – more than 150,000 people. Ashok was one of the residents. Researchers and
activists confirm that the majority of residents were daily wage workers – construction workers,
rickshaw pullers, domestic workers and ragpickers or recyclers – who had migrated to Delhi
starting in the early 1970s. A significant proportion had been brought to Delhi by contractors to
build the necessary infrastructure for the Asian Games in 1982. Many families in the area tell the
story of filling in the vacant marshy embankment, considered “too soft” to build on, with leftover
sand and brick from construction sites, slowly turning it into a habitable settlement. In February
and April 2004, over several 24-hour long operations involving hundreds of armed police officers
and bulldozer crews, all the homes and community buildings in Pushta were razed to the ground
(Photos 1a and 1b).

Pushta was the first casualty in a series of informal settlement evictions that have reconfigured the
face of millennial Delhi. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under
“slum clearance” schemes. However, between 2004 and 2007 alone, at least 45,000 homes were
demolished, and in late 2007, eviction notices were served on at least three other large
settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted in this latter time period received
any alternative resettlement sites.
These evictions were not the result of planning directives or actions initiated by either municipal or
city level state authorities. They were instead the final result of several public interest litigations
(PILs) filed in Delhi courts by non-poor resident welfare and trade associations. It was the Delhi
High Court that ordered Ashok’s displacement, ruling against the appeals of the Visthapan Virodhi
Andolan (anti-displacement campaign) and arguing that Delhi “…is a show window to the world of
our culture, heritage, traditions and way of life. It cannot be allowed to degenerate and decay.”
Outside the courtroom, the city government remained silent, saying simply that it would respect
the court’s rulings. A protest outside the president’s house by nearly 500 children asking that the
evictions be postponed until after their school year exams failed to illicit even an
acknowledgement. At the same time, a leading national daily, the Times of India, started their
“Walled City to World City” campaign and hailed the decision as a “return to order” and “good
governance” in an emerging “world class city”. In the weeks before and after the evictions, digital
renderings of the promenade to be built in place of the settlements were constantly shown on the
newspaper’s pages. The evictions themselves, and the lack of any resettlement options for those
displaced, got little coverage, and in a matter of months the land was cleared.
Informal settlements are not new to Delhi and neither are evictions. Yet post-millennial evictions
are different, not just in degree but in kind, from evictions in the past. It is not just the increased
frequency and intensity of evictions, or the lack of resettlement/compensation that marks them as
different, but the involvement of the courts rather than the state, the use of altered definitions of
“public interest”, the silence of the city government and the lack of empathy within the media and
the public – all parts of a changing urban politics within which evictions must be located and
understood. A set of questions emerges from this changing politics: How were evictions
successfully framed as just, ethical and markers of “good governance”? How were the rights of so
many citizens denied within a framework of democratic and electoral accountability and in the
name of “public interest”? Why did urban social movements fail to successfully mobilize support
and public opinion against the evictions? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do post-
millennial evictions tell us about urban government, citizenship and claims to urban space in
contemporary Indian cities?
Contemporary urban India exists in a moment that is framed by multiple transformations: liberal
market reforms initiated in 1991 that have led to a profound economic and social restructuring;
the emerging notion of “world class cities” at a time of increasing global interaction and a media
explosion; and a changing aspirational and economic landscape for the non-poor. Within these
transformations and as part of them, this paper argues that the evictions are markers of a larger
critical shift in urban politics and, particularly, in how the urban poor in India are represented,
governed and judged. It is this shift that explains and underlies both the increased occurrence of
evictions as well as their reception.

What is this shift? I identify three main components:

• increasingly altered understandings of poverty and inequality based on a “misrecognition” of the
poor that become the ethical basis of the disavowal of their rights;
• a changing discourse on the ideas of government rooted in the slow demise of the nationalist
development state and the rise of neoliberal ideologies of self-government and market
participation; and
• an increasing “aestheticization” of poverty and city space that alters how the poor are
represented and visualized within the city. (...)

II. PARADIGM SHIFTS: HISTORICAL URBAN SETTLEMENT IN DELHI AND POST-

MILLENNIAL EVICTIONS

In 2003, the Economic Survey of Delhi mapped the types of habitation in the National Capital
Territory of Delhi. The results are summarized in Table 1. Using data from 2000, the table shows
that at most, 23.7 per cent of Delhi’s population lives in planned colonies that met all conditions of
legality at the time of their establishment, and followed the classic plan–build–service–occupy
order that urban planners preach. Just over 19 per cent of the city lives in unplanned but legal
settlements characterized by economic poverty and physical fragility. These settlements are legal
due to their notifi cation as “slums” under the 1956 Slum Areas Act, which made them eligible for
improvements and ensured them protection from eviction without resettlement. The last
settlement to be identifi ed as a “slum” under this Act, however, was notified in 1973.

Settlements that share the physical fragility and poverty of the slums but that are not notified
under the Slum Areas Act are called JJ clusters (14.8 per cent). A significant 5.3 per cent of the city
lives in “unauthorized colonies”, which are distinguished from JJ clusters not because one is more
legal than the other, but because JJ clusters represent poor settlements, while “unauthorized
colonies” tend to be non-poor settlements.

The other categories represent settlements that were illegal on inception but that have since been
regularized. In the 1970s and 1980s, compensation and resettlement were common practice even
for areas not notified under the Slum Areas Act. When JJ clusters were demolished, their residents
were resettled into new and legal, albeit peripheral, resettlement colonies called JJ resettlement
colonies (12.7 per cent). This is precisely what Ashok hoped for should he be evicted: a post-facto
regularization. When non-poor settlements were regularized, it was almost always in situ, and
these were termed “regularized–unauthorized colonies” (12.7 per cent). Thus, even within the
statistics, a difference between the illegality of the non-poor and the illegality of the poor was
maintained.

I cite these facts to illustrate a simple point: like most Indian megacities, the planned city of Delhi is
only a small part of the city as a whole, and historically it has always been so. At its most benign,
this means that the peripheral construction and the “wait and watch” game of postfacto
regularization has, in fact, been the means by which much of the urban space of the city has been
organized. Building his house on public land, our scrap dealer Ashok rightly expected to get, were
he to survive in the settlement long enough, either a tenured resettlement site or the post-facto
regularization of his self-constructed house.

A mix of claims based on rights, needs and perceived entitlements from the state ensured this
expectation, public opinion endorsed it and the courts protected it. Ashok had, in other words, a
certain set of expectations of the state based on what James Holston has called a “…hybrid mix of
special treatment rights, text-based rights and contributor rights.”(13) The first followed from his
poverty, or need; the second from his legal citizenship; and the third from his contribution to and
work within the city. The increasing frequency, ethical acceptability and apparent inevitability of
evictions without resettlement in millennial Delhi mark the rupture of precisely this set of claims
that defined the right of the poor to the city. (...)

III. THE COURTS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

In India, regional high courts and the Supreme Court of India are perceived as institutions that
protect the rights of ordinary citizens from an executive that inspires a far lower degree of trust in
the public and that is often accused of being corrupt, politically motivated and, importantly, deeply
inefficient. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of judicial innovations further cemented the
court’s positioning of itself as a site for justice for the poor and marginalized. (...) The era of the
“public interest litigation”, or PIL, was born. PILs opened up the door to “ordinary citizens” to
approach the highest courts of the land in matters of public interest either to “…espouse the cause
of the poor and oppressed (representative standing) or to (seek) enforce(ment) (of) performance of
public duties (citizen standing).”

While the PIL revolution is pervasive across urban India, nowhere has its impact been more
pronounced than in Delhi. (…) In all of the recent eviction drives mentioned at the beginning of
this paper, it was orders within ongoing PILs that ultimately cleared the way for evictions to take
place. The evictions in Pushta, for example, were the result of the judgment of the courts in three
related PILs, one concerned with solid waste management and two with the enforcement of the
master plan. It is important to note that these judgments are not claims to the protection of
privately held property, nor are they cases of rights violations of any individual party – Pushta was
(and remains) public land. How could a judgment delivered in the “public interest” order the
eviction of nearly 150,000 people? To understand this, we must look first at the changing fortunes
of the urban poor within the courts since the mid-1980s and then to the contemporary political
moment, in which the judges are ruling against the poor.

IV. (UN)SETTLING THE LAND: CASE LAW ON INFORMALITY FROM 1985 TO 2006

In 1985, the Supreme Court of India issued a landmark judgment that was to hold precedent over
cases regarding evictions and resettlement in cities. In Olga Tellis vs. Bombay Municipal
Corporation (1985), the Supreme Court ruled that “…the right to livelihood is an important facet of
the right to life.” In effect, the court argued that “…the eviction of the (pavement dwellers) will lead
to deprivation of their livelihood and consequently to the deprivation of life.” It argued that the
urban poor do not “…claim the right to dwell on pavements or in slums for the purpose of pursuing
any activity which is illegal, immoral or contrary to public interest. Many of them pursue
occupations which are humble but honourable.” Importantly, the court also acknowledged that it
was the state’s non-implementation of the master plans of cities that had caused the problem in
the first place. It is important to read the judgment in this case clearly. Although the court did not
stop demolitions, the text of the judgment betrays empathy for the plight of “pavement dwellers”,
a desire to minimize harm caused during the process of resettlement and an acknowledgment of
the planning failures of the state. Further, it instructed the government to resettle those who
(implicitly) it had failed to house. There were other cases at this time that echoed a similar
empathy. (...)

Then the tone changed, both suddenly and dramatically. In Almitra Patel vs. the Union of India
(2000), the court opined that Delhi should be the “…showpiece of the country” yet “…no effective
initiative of any kind” has been taken for “…cleaning up the city”. Rather than see them as the last
resort for shelter, “…slums” the court said, were “…large areas of public land, usurped for private
use free of cost.” The slum dweller was named an “encroacher” and the resettlement that had
hitherto been mandatory became, suddenly, a matter of injustice, “…rewarding an encroacher on
public land with an alternative free site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket for stealing.” (…)

The very citizenship of the urban poor began to be called into question. In Dhar vs. Government of
Delhi (2002), the court differentiated between the justice deserved by slum dwellers who are
“unscrupulous citizens” and the “honest citizens who have to pay for land or a flat”. In Hem Raj vs.
Commissioner of Police (1999), the rights of “unscrupulous citizens” were summarily dismissed:
“When you are occupying illegal land, you have no legal right, what of talk of fundamental right, to
stay there a minute longer.” This was done in the name of order: “If encroachments on public land
are to be allowed, there will be anarchy.” (…) When asked where the poor were meant to reside in
the city if not in informal settlements, the judge said: “If they cannot afford to live in Delhi, let
them not come to Delhi.” (...)

Why did this shift occur? What explains the changing language of the courts? We now turn to the
first of the components of the shift in urban politics that I argue explains the changing political
circumstances of Delhi post-1991, namely altered understandings of (in)equality, urban
government and citizenship.
 V. INEQUALITY, RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY

In the decades of heady nationalism and state-planned growth after Independence, a nationalist
“developmentalism” dominated Indian political economy. The welfare state led a centralized,
planned, “socialist” and inward-looking economy where the state (at least conceptually) provided
all services and the private sector was deeply restricted. Faith in the development project of the
state united elite and poor alike. (...) The country, its industry, its cities, its housing, its local, urban
and public transport, higher education and even consumption were all managed, if not directly
produced, by the state.

By the 1970s and 1980s, faith in state-led development and growth had been shattered by poor
economic growth rates, the slow decline of poverty and barely any improvement in the quality of
life. After a domestic economic crisis led to the adoption of liberalization and economic reforms in
1991, the story changed. Growing at rates of between 7 and 9 per cent consistently since the late
1990s, the Indian economy has expanded rapidly, just as lowered restrictions have opened up its
markets and its people to an incredible influx of consumer goods and services, media and images
of the world. The “licensing Raj” has given way in urban India to a rapidly growing service and
consumption-centric economy, intent on claiming its place on a global stage. (...)

The court judgments against the poor are stark markers that the welfare, nationalist and
development state that stressed cohesion and the inclusion of the poor in the national economic
mission is no longer the dominant ethical model of contemporary India. These judgments align
with and are reinforced by a growing conception of self-government through market participation
that has replaced the notion of state patrimony. Citizens are increasingly “freed” of the state and
able to provide for themselves and optimize their market participation to increase their wealth and
their consumption. On the flip side, they must also now negotiate access to services and work
without state patrimony. This is what Rose calls “self-responsibilization”. (…)

As we accept “self-responsibilization”, the responsibility of ensuring housing and access to services

becomes not the responsibility of the state or the elite but of the poor themselves, and the only
pathway to it is through the market. Able to gate their communities, privatize their services and
imagine themselves as global citizens and consumers, the elite no longer feel obliged to belong to
the same imagined city as the poor. Inequality is, therefore, naturalized as an inevitable part of any
(market) society. It is no longer understood as a problem of what the poor lack but instead, one of
what they have been unable to do. The possible conceptions of a solution are based on the
management of the poor either by their own participation in the market (microfinance, self-help)
or through the voluntary associations of civil society (NGOs).

In this conception of government, the role of the state therefore changes from being the bearer of
the nationalist development engine to being the enabler of “growth”. The logics of growth, within
the court, are intertwined with the mechanisms of law, order and master planning, to become
received realities for policy makers, the media and judges alike. Within this logic, Pushta residents
do indeed “keep the land from other uses that cannot be denied”, for the land’s value as a site for
housing for the poor is not equal to its value as part of the city as a growth machine. The “moral”
citizen becomes re-defined in terms of a particular kind of economic productivity. Therefore, in the
courts, “honest citizens” become those who “pay for a flat”. (...) This hegemony is not just created
by the market alone, however. It is reinforced by a more broadly changing conception of citizenship
and altered representations of the figure of the poor. It is to these discursive and aesthetic changes
that I now turn.
 VI. PERSONIFYING THE ENCROACHER: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE POOR

(…) The figure of the encroacher establishes a foundation on the basis of which the poor can be
seen as unworthy of legal and constitutional protection. As national citizens, they cannot, under
any argument, be denied a claim to constitutionally enshrined rights. Indeed, this has been the
basis for demands of equity and inclusion articulated by social movements since Indian
Independence. Therefore, in order, ethically, to justify denying a national citizen his text-based
rights, it becomes necessary to make the informal settler into an “improper” citizen. Through the
act of naming and categorizing residents of informal settlements as encroachers and thieves, the
courts are performing just this task.

Other discursive shifts further add to this erosion. During the demolition hearings, the residents of
Pushta were constantly accused of polluting the Yamuna River, both in court and by the media. The
poor have always been targeted as carriers of disease and creators of unsanitary living conditions
but, in the past, these attributions were also used as mobilizing strategies by activists and the
media alike to highlight the vulnerability of the poor and their heightened need for state services.
In other words, public health concerns were just as much about the lack of access of the poor to
good health as they were about the dangers these realities posed for the rest of society. In
contemporary representation, however, the poor are held to be largely, actively and
disproportionately responsible for threats to the environment and public health, in what Baviskar
has compellingly termed “bourgeoisie environmentalism”.

VII. AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT: THE HYPERVISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY OF

THE POOR

Looking at informal settlements in Bangalore, Benjamin argued that the “poor” have been reduced
to “slums”. This focus on an image of the built environment – the literal physical architecture of the
slum and the land it is built on – is part of what Roy and others have called an “aestheticization of
poverty”. Roy defines “aestheticization” as a simplification that changes the relationship between
the “viewer and the viewed” to one of “aesthetics rather than politics”. An aesthetic
representation of the slum reduces it to its built environment, one characterized by poverty, filth
and fragility. It becomes an image of all that is unwanted. The politics behind the creation of the
slum – the failure of the state to build low-income housing, or the productivity, community and
work that also characterize the slum – are all eclipsed. The slum is understood or, put another way,
consumed as an image: without history, without structure and emptied of those who live within it.

This reduction of the slum to a flat image without history has to be seen in conjunction with the
emergence of the discourse of the “world class city” in millennial Delhi. Just as reducing the
impoverishment of the poor to the aesthetics of their built environment leads to a singular
representation both of “the poor” and “the slum”, the city where this slum is located is itself being
turned into an image, a commodity called a “world class city”.

We are seeing a shift in how a “problem” comes to be articulated and in the “solutions” that
emerge in direct response to such an articulation. Speaking of the poor only as the residents of
slums (…) allows an erasure of their particular structural exclusion and economic marginalization.
(…) Thus reduced, evictions and resettlement become not tales of the destruction of individual
people’s lives and livelihoods, but simply the erasure of an image of a slum, emptied of the people
who live within it.
This erasure, in turn, is necessary to transform the city’s appearance into a “world class city”. It is
not just poverty that is “aestheticized”, but city space itself. Since Delhi won the bid to host the
Commonwealth Games in 2010, the city has seen the launch of sustained massive media
campaigns by leading newspapers and by the city government, speaking of Delhi’s arrival as a
“world class city”. The Games have made visible the aestheticization of city space and the vital
importance of how the city is seen and consumed by a global audience. The removal of the slums
from the city’s central areas is only one of many policies that are, arguably, part of transforming its
aesthetic to bring it into line with the image of a “world class city”; private developers increasingly
fight height restrictions in the city and promote upper-class residential enclaves, and the city has
also recently announced a ban on rickshaws in the walled old city of Shahjahanbad in north Delhi
and a ban on street food vendors and hawkers on major south Delhi roads.

At this juncture, it is telling to see what use the land reclaimed from the Pushta settlements has
been put to. The land remains public – it has not realized its “market” value by being put to
alternative, rent-generating uses. It is in the process of being transformed into a riverside
promenade. The uses that the “land was being kept from” according to the courts, therefore, are
not simply explained by freeing land to generate maximum rent – an equal value is attached to the
perceived need to build a riverside promenade. Its symbolism and aesthetic seek to re-order Delhi
as an upperclass city of leisure, where a new economically emboldened ideal citizen can walk by
the river. Indeed, the promenade’s location near to the site of the Commonwealth Games village,
which is intended to house the incoming athletes, is far from accidental. As the city prepares for its
moment on the global stage, the images of the slum and the city actively begin to shape the literal
space of the city.

VIII. A NEW SOCIOSPATIAL URBAN ORDER?

For the urban poor in India, the right to the city, not the right to property or the rights attained as
property owners, has been the basis of a claim to urban residency and citizenship. This right has
always strongly derived from national citizenship and been legitimized by recognition of the
working migrant poor – as (“humble”) workers, providers of services, (vulnerable) citizens of the
state and subjects of the national development ideal. It is this recognition that has been steadily
eroded in the first decade of the new millennium.

The erosion of the claim of the poor to be legitimate urban citizens, and the simultaneous erasure
of their presence in the city, is made possible in a democratic society through a changing urban
political landscape, one characterized by a shift in the representation of the poor in a context of
changing expectations of government and an increasing aestheticization of poverty and urban
space. This shift is based on representations of the poor as economically unviable, environmentally
harmful and criminal, as they are recreated as a homogenous category inseparable from the built
environments of the illegal “slums” they inhabit. It is made possible by invoking a particular set of
values – hygiene, environment, progress and growth-centric government, market participation,
planning, order, aesthetics, notions of a “world class city” and leisure. (...) Justice Bhagwati’s
innovative mechanism to articulate the interests of the marginalized has become “…not the end
point of citizen mobilization but, rather, points of entry for those with a distinct view based on
particular sensibilities.” It is these “sensibilities” that increasingly define the right to the city and
urban citizenship in contemporary Indian cities, and they are, I suggest, representative of a new
ideal citizen-subject in the making: an aspirational middle-class consumer citizen, ideally primed to
live in a “world class city”. (…)
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